Cognitive Psychology, 5th Edition

Cognitive Psychology, 5th Edition

Description

Cognitive Psychology, Fifth Edition, provides balanced coverage of the core areas of the discipline, including perception, memory, language, pattern recognition, and thinking. John Best skillfully relates cognitive psychology to students' experience and provides a solid foundation for later studies in psychology or in related fields. Experiments throughout the book are described in detail, enhancing students' comprehension of the concepts and helping students who have not had courses in experimental psychology or statistics to grasp the concepts. With additional demonstrations and a contemporary treatment of memory, Best addresses complex issues in cognitive neuroscience clearly and completely.

New information is included on the Ebbinghaus Tradition and Object Recognition.

More neuropsychological and neural science findings appear throughout the book, especially in the chapters on attention, memory, knowledge structure, and language.

Memory chapters reflect what's new in memory from both a storage perspective and a reconstructive perspective.

A chapter on categorization and conceptual structure reflects the explosion of theory and findings from the 1990's.

Each chapter begins with an overview in which the author provides an anecdote as a springboard into the questions and issues of the chapter. This overview helps introduce students to the concepts in the chapters.

"Summary" sections occur at various points within all chapters. These summaries offer breathing spaces and logical starting and stopping places within the chapter.

"Focus on Research" boxes, found in each chapter, examine some specific research question or phenomenon in more detail than in the main narrative. The focus boxes help show students how cognitive scientists go about making interior processes more overt.

"Using Your Knowledge of Cognition" boxes show students how cognitive psychology can be applied to many issues that may arise during a typical day.